Online social network services provide members with a mechanism for defining, and memorializing in a digital format, representations of themselves (e.g., member profiles) and their relationships with other people. This digital representation of relationships between members is frequently referred to as a social graph. Many social network services utilize a social graph to facilitate electronic communications and the sharing of information between its members. For instance, the relationship between two members of a social network service, as defined in the social graph of the social network service, may determine the access and sharing privileges that exist between the two members. As such, the social graph in use by a social network service may determine the manner in which two members of the social network service can interact with one another via the various communication and sharing mechanisms supported by the social network service.
One issue that arises in such social network services is that members often want to know the “importance” of another member of the social network service. How “important” a particular member is may impact, for example, whether other members wish to attempt to establish a social graph connection with the member and/or reach out in other ways (e.g., send an email) to the member. One commonly used mechanism to gauge “importance” of a member is to simply total up the number of connections the member has to other members, under the presumption that the more connections the member has, the more important the member must be. This gauge of “importance,” however, has a high failure rate, as the collecting of connections in a social network has become a game of sorts for a number of members, who seem keen on adding connections no matter how weak of a relationship they have with other members and no matter the relevance of the member on the other end of the relationship to the member's own business or needs.